The author of The Black Hearts of Men, a co-winner of the 2002 Frederick Douglass Book Prize and runner-up for the Lincoln prize, Harvard literature professor John Stauffer offers this insightful dual biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. As Douglass and Lincoln reinvented themselves and ultimately became friends, they ushered in a major shift in American cultural history, rejecting the status quo to embrace new ideals of personal liberty.

"Both Lincoln and Douglass heard the music of words in their heads as few others, and Stauffer has an ear for the two of them in harmony. That they started in such different places ideologically and yet moved together at the critical moment of emancipation makes this a timely and important book."—David W. Blight

"John Stauffer's collective biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln stands apart from other biographies by focusing on how each man continually remade himself, with help from women, words, self-education, physical strength, and luck. In the process Stauffer gives us the texture and feel—a 'thick description'—of the strange worlds that Douglass and Lincoln inhabited. The result is a path-breaking work that dissolves traditional conceptions of these two seminal figures (Lincoln the 'redeemer' president, Douglass the assimilationist). He reveals how Douglass towered over Lincoln as a brilliant orator, writer, agitator, and public figure for most of his life. He shows us how words became potent weapons for both men. And he tells the poignant story of how these preeminent self-made men ultimately converged, despite their vastly different agendas and politics, and helped transform the nation."—Henry Louis Gates Jr.